19. MANAGING HUE, SATURATION, AND BRIGHTNESS

ONCE YOU’VE FINISHED adjusting the exposure and tonality of your image, you can focus on making changes to individual colors. Lightroom makes it pretty easy to do this with the Hue, Saturation, and Luminance (HSL) sliders in the Develop module.

The HSL panel separates colors and lets you change them with a series of sliders. When you first expand the panel, you’ll note that the Hue option is selected (Figure 19.1), so sliding each of the color sliders will adjust the hues in the image first. The color bar directly under each slider marker shows you what the color change will be when you adjust that slider. Switching from Hue to Saturation or Luminance will change the effect those sliders have on the individual colors you see.

While these sliders are very powerful, I find that a lot of people don’t know which color they want to adjust when they are looking at an image. I mean, if I asked you to change the magenta values in a picture, I would guess that a good portion of people wouldn’t really know what they’re changing—I barely do.

This is why I think the Targeted Adjustment Tool is pretty brilliant (Figure 19.2). Rather than having to figure out what color you need, you can click on the tool to select it, and then click and drag on the area you want to change in the image. Clicking on the area and dragging to the left and right will adjust the associated color sliders in the HSL panel (Figure 19.3). If you want to change the Luminance or Saturation, just switch to the appropriate mode and select the Targeted Adjustment Tool again.

If you want to reset a slider, simply doubleclick on the slider marker and it will jump back to its default middle position (Figure 19.4). To reset all of the sliders in one pass, double-click on the word Hue, and all of the markers will return to their original positions.

It’s important to note that the changes you make to each slider will affect that specific color throughout the entire image. If you want to have greater control over how a specific color looks in a particular area of a picture, you are better off moving the image into Photoshop and doing a selective color adjustment with the HSL Adjustment Layer and a Layer Mask.

Figure 19.1 The HSL Sliders in Lightroom

Figure 19.2 The Targeted Adjustment Tool

Figure 19.3 Adjusting the hue in an image with the Targeted Adjustment Tool.

Figure 19.4 Resetting the Blue Hue slider.